I'm a Stranger Here Myself (11 page)

I recently learned from an old friend in Iowa that if you are caught in possession of a single dose of LSD in my native state you face a mandatory sentence of seven years in prison without possibility of parole.

Never mind that you are, say, eighteen years old and of previous good character, that this will ruin your life, that it will cost the state $25,000 a year to keep you incarcerated. Never mind that perhaps you didn’t even know you had the LSD— that a friend put it in the glovebox of your car without your knowledge or maybe saw police coming through the door at a party and shoved it into your hand before you could react. Never mind any extenuating circumstances whatever. This is America in the 1990s and there are no exceptions where drugs are concerned. Sorry, but that’s the way it is. Next.

It would be nearly impossible to exaggerate the ferocity with which the United States now prosecutes drug offenders. In fifteen states you can be sentenced to life in prison for owning a single marijuana plant. Newt Gingrich, the House Speaker, recently proposed that anyone caught bringing as little as two ounces of marijuana into the United States should be imprisoned for life without possibility of parole. Anyone caught bringing more than two ounces would be executed.

According to a 1990 study, 90 percent of all first-time drug offenders in federal courts were sentenced to an average of five years in prison. Violent first-time offenders, by contrast, were imprisoned less often and received on average just four years in prison. You are, in short, less likely to go to prison for kicking an old lady down the stairs than you are for being caught in possession of a single dose of any illicit drug. Call me soft, but that seems to me a trifle disproportionate.

Please understand it is not remotely my intention here to speak in favor of drugs. I appreciate that drugs can mess you up in a big way. I have an old school friend who made one LSD voyage too many in about 1977 and since that time has sat on a rocker on his parents’ front porch examining the backs of his hands and smiling to himself. So I know what drugs can do. I just haven’t reached the point where it seems to me appropriate to put someone to death for being an idiot.

Not many of my fellow countrymen would agree with me. It is the clear and fervent wish of most Americans to put drug users behind bars, and they are prepared to pay almost any price to achieve this. The people of Texas recently voted down a $750 million bond proposal to build new schools but overwhelmingly endorsed a $1 billion bond for new prisons, mostly to house people convicted of drug offenses.

America’s prison population has more than doubled since 1982. There are now 1,630,000 people in prison in the United States. That is more than the populations of all but the three largest cities in the country. Sixty percent of federal prisoners are serving time for nonviolent offenses, mostly to do with drugs. America’s prisons are crammed with nonviolent petty criminals whose problem is a weakness for illegal substances.

Because most drug offenses carry mandatory sentences and exclude the possibility of parole, other prisoners are having to be released early to make room for all the new drug offenders pouring into the system. In consequence, the average convicted murderer in the United States now serves less than six years, the average rapist just five. Moreover, once he is out, the murderer or rapist is immediately eligible for welfare, food stamps, and other federal assistance. A convicted drug user, no matter how desperate his circumstances may become, is denied these benefits for the rest of his life.

The persecution doesn’t end there. My friend in Iowa once spent four months in a state prison for a drug offense. That was almost twenty years ago. He did his time and since then has been completely clean. Recently, he applied for a temporary job with the U.S. Postal Service as a holiday relief mail sorter. Not only did he not get the job, but a week or so later he received by recorded delivery an affidavit threatening him with prosecution for failing to declare on his application that he had a felony conviction involving drugs.

The Postal Service had taken the trouble, you understand, to run a background check for drug convictions on someone applying for a temporary job sorting mail. Apparently it does this as a matter of routine—but only with respect to drugs. Had he killed his grandmother and raped his sister twenty-five years ago, he would in all likelihood have gotten the job.

It gets more amazing. The government can seize your property if it was used in connection with a drug offense, even if you did not know it. In Connecticut, according to a recent article in the
Atlantic Monthly
magazine, a federal prosecutor named Leslie C. Ohta made a name for herself by seizing the property of almost anyone even tangentially connected with a drug offense—including a couple in their eighties whose grandson was found to be selling marijuana out of his bedroom. The couple had no idea that their grandson had marijuana in the house (let me repeat: they were in their eighties) and of course had nothing to do with it themselves. They lost the house anyway.

The saddest part of this zealous vindictiveness is that it simply does not work. America spends $50 billion a year fighting drugs, and yet drug use goes on and on. Confounded and frustrated, the government enacts increasingly draconian laws until we find ourselves at the ludicrous point where the Speaker of the House can seriously propose to execute people—strap them to a gurney and snuff out their lives—for possessing the botanical equivalent of two bottles of vodka, and no one anywhere seems to question it.

My solution to the problem would be twofold. First, I would make it a criminal offense to be Newt Gingrich. This wouldn’t do anything to reduce the drug problem, but it would make me feel much better. Then I would take most of that $50 billion and spend it on rehabilitation and prevention. Some of it could be used to take busloads of youngsters to look at that school friend of mine on his Iowa porch. I am sure it would persuade most of them not to try drugs in the first place. It would certainly be less brutal and pointless than trying to lock them all up for the rest of their lives.

We have a man named Walt who does a little carpentry around the house from time to time. He looks to be about 112 years old, but goodness me the man can saw and hammer. He has been doing handiwork around town for at least fifty years.

Walt lives in Vermont, just across the Connecticut River from our little town, and is a proper New Englander—honest, hardworking, congenitally disinclined to waste time, money, or words. (He converses as if he has heard that someday he will be billed for it.) Above all, like all New Englanders, he is an early riser. Boy, do New Englanders like to get up early. We have some English friends who moved here a few years ago. Soon after arriving the woman called the dentist for an appointment and was told to come at 6:30 the following day. She showed up the next evening to find the dentist’s office in darkness. They had meant 6:30 A.M., of course. If Walt were told to come for a dental appointment at that hour I am positive he would ask if they had anything a little earlier.

Anyway, the other day he arrived at our house a few minutes before seven and apologized for being late because the traffic through Norwich had been “fierce.” What was interesting about this was not the notion that traffic in Norwich could ever be fierce but that he pronounced it “Norritch,” like the English city. This surprised me because everyone in Norwich and for miles around pronounces it “Nor-wich” (i.e., with the “w” sounded, as in “sandwich”).

I asked him about that.

“Ayuh,” he said, which is an all-purpose New England term, spoken in a slow drawl and usually accompanied by the removal of a cap and a thoughtful scratching of the head. It means, “I may be about to say something . . . but then again I may not.” He explained to me that the village was pronounced “Norritch” until the 1950s, when outsiders from places like New York and Boston began to move in and, for whatever reason, started to modify the pronunciation. Now virtually everyone who is younger than Walt, which is virtually everyone, pronounces it “Nor-wich.” That seemed to me quite sad, the idea that a traditional local pronunciation could be lost simply because outsiders were too inattentive to preserve it, but it’s only symptomatic of a much wider trend.

Thirty years ago, three-quarters of the people in Vermont were born there. Today the proportion has fallen to barely half, and in some places it is much lower. In consequence, these days you are far less likely than you once were to hear locals pronouncing cow as “kyow,” saying “so don’t I” for “so do I,” or employing the colorful, if somewhat cryptic, expressions for which the state was once widely noted. “Heavier than a dead minister” and “jeezum-jee-hassafrats” are two that spring to mind if not, alas, to many Vermont tongues any longer.

If you go to the remoter corners of the state and hang out at a general store you might just overhear a couple of old farmers (pronounced “fahmuhs”) asking for “a frog skin more” of coffee or saying “Well, wouldn’t that just jar your mother’s preserves,” but more probably it will be urban refugees in L.L. Bean attire asking the storekeeper if he has any guavas.

The same thing has been happening all over the country. I have just been reading an academic study on the dialect of Ocracoke Island off the coast of North Carolina. Ocracoke is part of the Outer Banks, a chain of barrier islands where the inhabitants once spoke a hearty patois so rich and mysterious that visitors sometimes supposed they had stumbled on some half-lost outpost of Elizabethan England.

The locals—sometimes called “Hoi-Toiders” for the way they pronounced “high tide”—had an odd, lilting accent that incorporated many archaic terms, like “quammish” (meaning to feel sick or uneasy), “fladget” (for a piece of something), and “mommuck” (meaning to bother) that hadn’t been heard since Shakespeare put away his quill. Being a maritime people they also used nautical terms in distinctive ways. For instance, “scud,” meaning to run before a gale with a small amount of sail, was employed for land-based movements, so that an Ocracoker might invite you to go for a scud in his car. Finally, just to make the bewilderment of outsiders complete, they absorbed a number of non-English words, like “pizer” (apparently from the Italian “piazza”) for a porch, and pronounced the lot in a way that brought to mind Ringo Starr doing a Dorset accent. It was, in short, an interesting dialect.

All this scudded along, as you might say, in a dependable fashion until 1957 when the federal government built Ocracoke a bridge to the mainland. Almost at once tourists came in and the Ocracoke dialect began to go out.

All of this was scientifically monitored and recorded by linguists from North Carolina State University, who made periodic field trips to the island over half a century, on each visit noting a steady and seemingly terminal decline in the fragile idiolect. Then, to everyone’s surprise, the Ocracoke dialect began to undergo a revival. The researchers found that middle-aged people—those who had grown up in the 1950s and 1960s when tourism first became a dominant feature of island life—not only were returning to the old speechways but actually had more pronounced accents than their elders. The explanation, the researchers surmise, is that the islanders “exaggerate their island dialect features, whether consciously or not, because they want there to be no mistake that they are ‘real’ Ocracokers and not tourists or new residents recently relocated from the mainland.”

Much the same sort of phenomenon has been found elsewhere. A study of the dialect on Martha’s Vineyard revealed that certain traditional pronunciations there, such as flattening of the “ou” sound in words like “house” and “mouse,” making them something more like “hawse” and “mawse,” staged an unexpected rally after nearly going extinct. The driving force, it turned out, was natives who returned to the island after living away and embraced the old speech forms as a way of distinguishing themselves from the mass of nonnatives.

So does this mean that the rich and chewy Vermont accent will likewise recover and that once again we can expect to hear people say that something “would give you a pain where you never had an ache” or that they “felt rougher than a boar’s rear end”? Sadly, it seems not. From the evidence, it appears that these dialectal revivals happen only on islands or in communities that are in some way still comparatively isolated.

So it seems likely that when old Walt finally hangs up his saw and hammer whoever takes his place won’t sound like an old-time Vermonter even if he was born and reared there. I only hope he’s not such an early riser.